First, scale up to the robotic Turing test, then worry about feeling.
Consciousness is feeling, and the problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why some of the functions underlying some of our performance capacities are felt rather than just "functed." But unless we are prepared to assign to feeling a telekinetic power (which all evidence contradicts), feeling cannot be assigned any causal power at all. We cannot explain how or why we feel. Hence the empirical target of cognitive science can only be to scale up to the robotic Turing test, which is to explain all of our performance capacity, but without explaining consciousness or incorporating it in any way in our functional explanation.
Harnad
Stevan
S
Institut des sciences cognitives, Université du Québec à Montréal, Montréal, Québec, Canada H3C 3P8. harnad@uqam.ca
Scherzer
Peter
P
D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D003243:Consciousness; D012371:Robotics